When he finally connects with a female friend he is desperate to ask her: where had John been sitting during that first dinner that they had all shared together? He is already starting to forget, and he wants to get all the details right. Rather, we’re given a first glimpse of our protagonist in his thirties, running down an Italian seaside street towards a payphone. The film, directed by Neil Armfield, opens not with a bumbling young Tim negotiating his newfound same-sex attraction (a chastely erotic friendship with his fellow schoolmate, which endearingly ends with a realization: “ Fuck, I’m a poofter.”). In contrast, the filmed adaptation of Conigrave’s memoir excises these schoolyard moments almost entirely, opting for a framing device that allows for brief flashbacks. “But I’m worried that we’re missing out on what people our age are supposed to be experiencing … I don’t believe that it’s fair to expect our lovers to fulfill all our needs.” Page by page we are guided through a personal narrative which overlaps crucially with the conversations happening around gay liberation in the late decades of the twentieth century. “You know I love you,” he tells his then boyfriend. The book is honest in its exploration of the oft-hushed musings of pubescent homosexual boys, as well as in its frank mining of the limits of radical queer sexual politics in the 1970s and 80s. Holding the Man’s most touching moments happen when Conigrave finds himself navigating, in ways both intellectual and emotional, his own sexuality.
Would the other guys think he was handsome? Cover of first edition (1995)
What makes me think he’s handsome? I like the way he is. He gives us his thoughts after he’d started up at a new all-boys school: What he did know, however, was that he had an unusual interest in other boys. As he describes it, he never cared much about sports and would not have been able to define what “holding the man” even meant. The title of its first section keys you in immediately to what preoccupied a young Tim: “A Head Full of Boys.” Despite growing up at the end of the freely loving sixties (when “the world seemed very exciting for a nine-year-old”), Conigrave was not spared the bullying and badgering that greeted most young boys who happened not to be like the others. Timothy Conigrave’s memoir, Holding the Man, was published in his native Australia in 1995. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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